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The delusion of immortality

Imagine all the poor transhumanists who were born in the 19th century. They would have been fantasizing about all the rapid transformations in their society, and blithely extrapolating forward. Why, in a few years, we’ll all have steam boilers surgically implanted in our bellies, and our diet will include a daily lump of coal! Canals will be dug everywhere, and you’ll be able to commute to work in your very own personal battleship! There will be ubiquitous telegraphy, and we’ll have tin hats that you can plug into cords hanging from the ceiling in your local coffeeshop, and get Morse code tapped directly onto your skull!

Alas, they didn’t have a Ray Kurzweil or Aubrey deGray to con them with absurd exaggerations.

Here’s the problem: you can’t simply extrapolate current technologies into the future, because a fundamental property of such change is that it requires novel technologies. So no, you can’t sit in the middle of the 19th century and argue that the future is all about the expansion of steam and coal, because someone is going to come along and derail your future with, say, internal combustion engines, or electric motors and high-capacity batteries. And don’t you dare sit there and feel smug about your Tesla car, because if we do innovate, the Tesla will be about as quaint as a Stanley.

But Futurians love to argue that broad trends are predictable, and inevitably will point to Moore’s Law as an example (as does that article!). Sorry, gang, but Moore’s Law is dead. I’d like to call this Myers’ Law — every technological trend will inevitably hit a ceiling, that will require abandonment of the technology — but it’s such a familiar concept to biologists who watch populations change over time that it’s unfair of me to claim it.

Another problem is that Futurians will glibly invent trends that don’t exist. Kurzweil is particularly guilty of this — he loves to cherry pick data and slap it on a graph to fit his preconceptions — and his followers never stop to look at the quality of the data and question the validity of his numbers. They just like the direction the line is going, and that’s enough for them. It makes the Singularity manifest in my lifetime? Then I approve. Don’t question it.

You cannot avoid comparisons to the predicted second coming of Jesus in these things, so go ahead and make it yourself.

That article is specifically talking about aging, though, and says that it’s inevitable that we’ll fix it. There are just seven little problems we have to address, and then we can live forever.

It’s symptomatic of the happy ignorance that permeates the whole idea that one of those problems is…cancer. Yes, we just have to cure cancer, and we remove one of the obstacles to immortality.

They predicted the objections people might raise — but we don’t have a cure for cancer, and that’s simply a ridiculous proposal — by also announcing their strategy for curing cancer. We’ll just turn off telomerases in all of our cells, and then cancer cells will automatically expire! Yay! It’s so easy! Why don’t you go tell your doctor to start giving you telomerase inhibitors?

It’s silly because your somatic cells already inactivate your telomerases. Cancers acquire mutations that switch them back on. There are also less well understood alternative mechanisms of telomere lengthening. Ask a cancer researcher, and they’ll tell you that they don’t expect to find a magic bullet.

It’s also a self-defeating strategy, because another cause of aging is the gradual death of stem cell populations. Every population of cells has a built-in time-limit that kills them off after a certain number of cell divisions — it’s like Carousel from Logan’s Run or the replicant expiration date in Bladerunner. Basically, their cure for cancer is to enforce the expiration date on cells even more forcefully.

But don’t you worry, they’re aware of the problem! So one of their seven strategies is to develop technology that replenishes stem cells. It’s all a hugely circular game of whack-a-mole. We’ll smack down this one problem! But that causes another problem to pop up. So we whack that one down! Then that creates another one. Whack! The hammers are just flying frantically here, and they’re so self-promoting that they don’t actually cure anything, but instead simply fuel an ever-accelerating game of perpetually whirling hammers.

But have no fear. We’ll eventually put a boiler and a coal chute on the hammer smacking machine, and then we’ll live forever!

One thing missing in all the techno-speculation is any consideration of whether individuals ought to live forever, if it were possible, and who is going to receive the benefits of these necessarily expensive biomedical interventions — medical interventions that will require constant life-long tinkering. It’s no surprise that the most enthusiastic proponents of technological life extension are young, well-off libertarian types who assume by default that they of course will be the beneficiaries of Futurian progress, that they will always have the money (forever!) to keep themselves healthy and young, and that the people who can’t buy in to their scheme don’t deserve it, anyway.

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And then when we’ve whacked the stem cell mole, we’ll just whack the tumor suppressor gene mole! And then the oncogene mole! And then the DNA repair mechanism mole! And then the transcription error mole! And then the harmful SNP mole! And then…

And even if you could do all the things to make our bodies live forever it’s not going to stop the other things that cause people to die. Like vehicle crashes. Or people killing other people. Or an earthquake destroying your town.

Why, in a few years, we’ll all have steam boilers surgically implanted in our bellies, and our diet will include a daily lump of coal! Canals will be dug everywhere, and you’ll be able to commute to work in your very own personal battleship! There will be ubiquitous telegraphy, and we’ll have tin hats that you can plug into cords hanging from the ceiling in your local coffeeshop, and get Morse code tapped directly onto your skull!

But that’s basically what Minnesota is like now, right? It’s been several years since I’ve been there.

The specific metabolic processes that are ultimately responsible for causing all of this damage are still only partially understood. The good news is that we don’t need to answer the many open questions about the causes of structural decay in order to develop effective therapies to reverse it. No matter what caused a given unit of damage in the first place, the same regenerative therapeutics can be used to repair it. In other words, it doesn’t matter how a given microscopic lesion occurred, if we apply rejuvenation biotechnologies that restore the machinery of life to proper working order.
[…]
Even after we have used these new therapies to repair an aging tissue, metabolic processes will continue to cause new damage. This simply means that rejuvenation biotechnologies are not a one-off fix, but will need to be periodically repeated to preserve youthful function. Just as cars need regular rounds of oil changes and spark plug replacements to keep them running smoothly, people will need to go in to rejuvenation clinics to keep up with their regenerative treatments to continue postponing age-related disease.

The bills will of course pile up over the eons. And that’s what life in proper working order is all about. You work for your entire life, so that you can continue working for your entire life.

Once they achieve their immortality, they will become risk averse; be mired in their early 21st century ways of seeing the world and as a result become less frequent contributors to innovation and be more resistant to change; and eventually will get rather bored with life and complain how the second 100 seasons of The Simpsons weren’t as good as the first 100.

Plus, do they not realize that they will never get retire? They are still going to have to work to pay for food and shelter for centuries to come. And if everyone can be immortal, how large a salary do you have to offer someone to risk their life to be a firefighter or a cop?

“…because if we do innovate, the Tesla will be about as quaint as a Stanley.”

Sadly, Stanley Steamers didn’t become obsolete because they were “old-fashioned technology”, any more than the first electric cars were technologically deficient. A modern external combustion engine (aka steam) would be more efficient and adaptable than modern IC engines. It will use anything that can burn as fuel.

The only reason IC engines won out was convenience (a Stanley required ‘warm-up’ time to generate a head of steam, electric cars had limited range) and that the crude technologies available then meant that IC engines had better performance. (Tell that to a ‘0-60 in 3 seconds’ Tesla set to ‘Ludicrous’ mode :-) and monopolists might (John D Rockefeller, like the Koch’s today, did everything he could to ensure his empire was at the center of our world.)

We actually lost out on a great deal of innovation as the automobile industry settled on a single power source solution. (Imagine a modern turboelectric Stanley steamer? Runs on used french fry oil and water from your garden hose.)

You talk about the “whack a mole”aspect of it as if it’s a problem. But if you’re learning new things about aging and human biology in the process, and actually are extending human life spans in fits and starts, what’s the problem?

Look at progress we’ve made so far on medicine. You could make the same “whack a mole” analogy there – “Hey, we discovered antibiotics that have drastically reduced mortality from infections, childbirth, and early childhood! Oops! Turns out now we’re all living long enough to die of heart disease in our 60s and 70s! Well, let’s get the fatality of heart attacks down . . . oops! Now our life expectancy is 78, and we’re dying in greater numbers of cancer!” But at each step of the way, we’re not only living longer, but we’re usually living better in terms of the stuff we can’t control about our lifestyles (the stuff we sort of can control, though . . . ).

One thing missing in all the techno-speculation is any consideration of whether individuals ought to live forever, if it were possible, and who is going to receive the benefits of these necessarily expensive biomedical interventions —

If or when we discover this stuff, we’ll fight for maximum distribution and availability. Of course this would all be much simpler if the US had a better universal health care system.

The wikipedia article on Diesel locomotives has a good section on why diesels won out. It was a combination of convenience in operations (fewer crew required, quick stop and start) and convenience in maintenance (diesels had far lower maintenance costs, higher efficiency, high standardization of components, no reliance on access to water and coal). Steam could make a comeback, but it would probably be “externally powered” in the sense that steam in a power plant is generating electricity that powers the train.

Of course. And we’ve been so successful with the discoveries we’ve made so far.

If you walk into a first world country with a real health system (not the patchy mess that is the US), would you say that you don’t have access to modern medical treatment, that it’s only available for rich folks in said countries?

But even in poor countries, a lot of this stuff is much more widely available than it used to be. Folks in India have lots of access to antibiotics, for example.

It must be a quite common error to look at the bottom of a “sigmoid curve” and assume it is eventually an “exponential curve”.
This leads to the Kurtzweil extrapolation of Moore’s Law* that soon the density of transistors and speed of computation will so far exceed human potential that AI will overtake.
Even that doesn’t address Kurtzweil’s extrapolation from so few sample points (aka “cherry picking”)
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* more properly renamed: “Moore’s Observation”
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The OP raises a good point to SF fans also. SF set in the future is still just a poor extrapolation of current trends. That whatever actually happens in the distant future is actually unimaginable (impossible to extrapolate from current capabilities)
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I’ve always wondered what it would be like to wake up from a several century long coma, or cryosuspension. What I have yet to find in SF (tho I’m sure there is somewhere) is the psychological trauma of being confronted with a totally different world with little tidbits of vague familiarity here and there. Worse than waking up in a different country with a different language and struggling to learn the language.

Moore’s Law ending actually makes sense with certain actions of tech companies. Microsoft is specifically doing several thing to deal with it as is adobe. Both are trying move to subscription models for their software, because like most paid software most people only buy the new versions when they upgrade their hardware. The former is funding quatum computing research for a similar reason.

I’m kind of surprised the wannabe technocrats don’t notice this. I have to wonder do they see the writing on the wall or are they intentionally ignoring it, or are they really this blind?

re 18:
[derail alert??]
steam was overtaken by IC, not simply due to convenience, but thermal efficiency. Steam creates heat to make steam to push the cylinder. IC uses heat to push the cylinder, directly. Team engines are not “cleaner” than IC, they both burn fuel.
What steam may have a little efficiency advantage: most steam locomotives had the steam both push and pull the pistons. Wankel tries to do that with its rotary IC.
[/derail]
that is what’s so cool about steampunk genre. Imagining how to achieve modern technology out of steam era technology with no discoveries of new techniques. Just imaginative tinkering in ‘steam tech’.

If you walk into a first world country with a real health system (not the patchy mess that is the US), would you say that you don’t have access to modern medical treatment, that it’s only available for rich folks in said countries?

But even in poor countries, a lot of this stuff is much more widely available than it used to be. Folks in India have lots of access to antibiotics, for example.

I don’t know the first thing about healthcare in India, but the smell of bullshit was too strong. Wiki:

The private healthcare sector is responsible for the majority of healthcare in India. Most healthcare expenses are paid out of pocket by patients and their families, rather than through insurance. This has led many households to incur Catastrophic Health Expenditure (CHE) which can be defined as health expenditure that threats a household’s capacity to maintain a basic standard of living.[2] As per a study, over 35% of poor Indian households incur CHE which reflects the detrimental state in which Indian health care system is at the moment.[2] With government expenditure on health as a percentage of GDP falling over the years and the rise of private health care sector, the poor are left with fewer options than before to access health care services.

Having access to antibiotics, if that’s even the case for everybody in India (which I’m sure isn’t true), wouldn’t count for shit, because countless medical issues aren’t treated with those. And India isn’t even poor, relative to many other countries. It’s a certainly a big economy, and if we’re talking about inequality instead of poverty, I’d guess it’s probably better than average. Yet huge swaths of people can’t afford medical care. So better than average doesn’t cut it. The fact that it’s “available” in a certain sense (as in, there are hospitals or other facilities which provide it, if you have the money) doesn’t get us anywhere.

What kind of psychological trauma would one experience after waking up in world of several centuries in the future from your maturation locale? Something I truly fear. Not just smaller tech at cheaper prices, etc. Even looking backwards is hard to imagine. EG what would a Victorian Era person think of Millenials walking around with Smartphones and GoogleGlasses?
I haven’t seen any SF address that side of “time travel” (i probly haven’t looked hard enough) Even if I found it, I dont think I’d even want to read about such distress. Futurians seem to completely disregard such distress.

Every time I read about the history of engines, I am struck by how many of the inventors come out of my personal gene pool. Schwabians and their machines and constant desire for more efficient methods have done many good things for the world, but I wish they had stuck with improved plows, wells, crops, and dairy cattle.

Let me counter the techno-utopian sci fi of Kurzeweil et al with a little dystopian fiction of my own that on the current track record of our society is at least as credible an outcome.

If this techno-utopian pipe dream of immortality does somehow come to fruition, we can probably look forward to a future ruled by a bunch of immortal Donald Trumps, able to endlessly accrue yet more wealth and power from one generation to the next until their grip on the levers of government is entirely unassailable, and their private armies of payed thugs are the premier military force on the planet.

As for the spread of the technology beyond the Immortal Trump-tocracy bloodlines, that could go one of two ways:-

Scenario 1 – They jealously hoard the tech for themselves and their most favoured cronies, and leave the rest of us to die the old fashioned way. Since the elite no longer age, fall sick, or have much other need for medical care, and since they hold the purse strings, funding for medical research that would help out mere mortals dries up totally. People die in the millions through entirely preventable illnesses and conditions just to keep the population within projected values, and so that the biotech companies owned by the transhuman elite can maintain demand for whatever overpriced scraps of private health care they do choose to dole out.

Scenario 2 – The technology is made widely available, but not out of generosity. It remains ruinously expensive, with every effort to ensure it stays that way, either through up front costs of ‘installation’, ongoing maintenance costs, or both. As a result, ordinary people can’t hope to afford the miracle cure to everything out of their own pocket, and so instead must rely on other sources for the funding. Their employers – corporations wholly owned by the transhuman elite perhaps – step into the gap, but the proviso is that the tech that provides your immortality is still owned by them until you pay off its cost, which will probably take centuries to achieve at the least, and all maintenance costs are added to the bill, probably meaning that your debt for your new life will always exceed your ability to pay it off, leaving you perpetually tied to your employer in what essentially amounts to a form of bonded labour. You might even wind up finding the majority of your wages paid to you in corporate scrip that can only be put toward paying off your ever growing pile of transhuman debt. It is not as though this approach is without historical precedent – it would simply be a higher tech version of the old Truck Token system.

Even better, should any employee fail to properly toe the line and lick the boots of their superiors to a degree found satisfactory by the would-be transhuman demi-gods of this brave new world, then they can be fired, and their full debt must be paid immediately, with failure to comply (whether out of financial incapacity to do so or not) resulting in the removal of the tech that sustains your new existence.

This might simply result in death, but more likely a subtler approach could be used that would outwardly leave the former employer’s hands clean – the expensive cybernetics (or whatever other technology makes this all possible) are replaced with more… economical alternatives, placing repayment within the reach of the former employee. Of course, such replacement surgery itself would be invasive and not without risk, and why would the employers waste money on top of the line facilities in its pursuit? So long as the tech remains viable for resale or reuse, that is sufficient. Beyond that, well, regrettable accidents do happen…

An even should the surgery come off without a hitch, the bargain basement replacement technology would doubtless come with its own endless litanies of unreliability and other technical problems, along with a lack of ready availability of maintenance services and replacement components for outdated tech, and having been blackballed as unreliable, getting a new job that would come with the prospect of better alternatives would be next to impossible. Technical failures could easily account for a high mortality rate – say 70 odd % – within maybe ten years, and everyone would know it. Unionization of the work force and any form of civil disobedience becomes a high risk proposition, doubly so when the technology in your own body could be relaying data on your every activity to the powers that be, and mere association with a dissident could mean that your friends and family find themselves facing their own pink slip and all that it entails.

Of course, should you refuse to play ball and get any modifications at all, then not only are you unemployable but you find your self living in a society that is fundamentally not set up for someone like you to survive :-

“what do you mean you have a serious lung infection and need anti-biotics? It is weird enough that you rely on those organic gas bags in your chest at all, but haven’t your immune system’s supplementary nanites already eliminated the source of infection? Oh, you aren’t enhanced. Really? I’m sorry, I’m afraid no medical service carries old style anti-biotics anymore. The microbial resistance outbreaks rendered all the old stuff ineffective in any case, and there is simply no money in new anti-biotic research in this day and age. Maybe if your insurance has coverage enough then… oh, you are unemployed because you are human baseline, and can’t afford insurance? I see…”

Welcome to the future folks, be sure to properly show your appreciation to good old Ray and Aubrey…

Ray Kurzweil is a symptom of a broader problem of societal craving for prolonged life. We are an aging population and with each decade, the proportion of centenarians continues to rise. When you hit your 90s and you are spared from cancer and dementia, then what is this obsession to live longer as each of your organs naturally fail? All too often I see patients in their 90s cruelly maintained on life support after a massive cardiac arrest whilst their 70 year old kids are sobbing to extend great grandpa’s (or grandma’s) life. And what is very peculiar is that this attitude is among the most religious whom I would expect would want the old geezer to be with sky daddy. You’re old, withered, slow, dyspneic, and your only wish is for a strong arm and a hand free of arthritis so you may independently wipe your ass after taking a dump. Nature is desperately trying to tell you that it’s time to check out.

You know, I have to love how steam power was abandoned.
I mean, it’s not like nuclear reactors heat water to boiling or anything, they derive power from fission via magic!
Our most advanced technology is nothing more than yet another way to boil water. Alas, that water is rubbish for making tea.

Moore’s law is also not dead, it’s still on life support via multiple cores, smoke and mirrors to give performance boosts selectively. We expect the life support to have its plug pulled any day now.
That doesn’t mean we abandon it, any more than we stopped boiling bloody water! We adjust our technology so that it will still work for us. For crying out loud, most computers spend 95+% of their time idle, waiting for input.

As for 2045 for singularity, that’s poppycock! It’s 2048, courtesy of some simple binary math and a rectally supplied number.
Besides, we already have a bunch of naked singularities running about, totally without spin.

Still, I can confidentially make a prediction about the future, one I’m absolutely certain of. Something will happen in the future. Something, no clue what, but something will happen, as something always happens. Something about thermodynamics or something. ;)
Now, excuse me, I have to go boil some water.

I feel the same way about self driving cars. Hordes of people yearn for the release of autonomous cars that will free them from the drudgery of driving, freeing them to drink daiquiris, read a book, or have a nap whilst they watch the omega trudge to work. Trouble is the technology doesn’t appear that robust to me, and it’s going to be a long while (20 years at least) before it is.

Energy technologies seem to be most efficient at different scales. External combustion rules at multiple megawatts, internal combustion at multiple kilowatts and batteries at multiple watts. Displacing IC engines from vehicles requires lots of work to make batteries happy. A few well publicized battery fires will slow progress. No doubt there will be new technologies looking at this evolutionary niche looking for a best fit.

As for autonomous vehicles, I suspect they’ll take off at some critical point where enough ordinary human drivers have been forced out of their position of control.

Your “Scenario 1” is essentially the New World Order conspiracy theory as espoused by people like Alex Jones. The only difference is that they believe it’s already happening–that the elites already possess life extension technology and the process of exterminating the other 90% of the world’s population is already under way (fluoride, cancer causing vaccines, autism, etc.)

I don’t believe either scenario is likely should long term life extension ever be possible. Early adoption could be limited to the wealthy, but assuming the procedure/drugs can be mass produced, (a) economies of scale will still allow the manufacturers to make billions even after making it widely affordable and (b) if they don’t, pressure will continue to mount on the political establishment until those who control the process are forced to make it widely available. It might take many years, but it would happen eventually. You’d hear a lot about the right to an extended life being a “human right” for example.

Even today, the quest for a few more weeks of life already costs this country $60 billion/year in terms of end-of-life Medicare expenditure. Gravely ill elderly patients routinely demand their doctors perform heroic procedures on them (like liver transplants) even though the odds of success are very low, and despite the amount of pain and suffering it causes. Just the remotest chance of living longer is enough.

If people are already willing to go through all that just for a few more months of life as an elderly and infirm human being, there is simply no way a new life-extension technology is kept out of the public’s hands in the long term. Denying people access would be more than enough to bring down governments.

Now, what would happen to a world where everyone suddenly started living 200, 300, or more years — that’s another question.

Every imaginable real growth of anything in our universe will inevitably hit a ceiling and either stop or fall. This understanding is one of few mathemtatical and statistical essential facts about our universe and it would be nice if not only technodreamers got it through their heads with regard to computer chips, but also politicians and economists with regard to GDP growths etc.

Even the various arms races during our evolutionary history are a testimony of this – big fast population explosions followed by stagnations and/or extictions.

Daughter works in the car insurance industry and she says that there are predictions that self-driving cars will be inexpensive by 2025, will be ubiquitous by 2027, and will be cheaper than driver-controlled vehicles by 2035, since they will be much safer and easier to insure. She thinks that the aging baby-boomers will create a huge demand for them.
I know that having such technology would improve my quality of life right now. I’m disabled, and can only drive locally, and even then only during the day when traffic is light. It drives me crazy to have to depend upon my husband or others to take me places that are further than 4-6 miles from home.

2045 is one of those dates that is far enough off that it won’t immediately be dismissed as ridiculous by everyone, yet close enough to hold out hope that it will happen in their lifetime.

Similar predictions are made about SETI, for example. We’ll make content “within 20 years.”

But I’m not ready to completely dismiss the possibility of life-extension, even to the point of virtual immortality. I don’t believe we’re anywhere close to it now, or will be within the next couple of centuries, but the future is a very long time, and with the important proviso that humanity manages to avoid a near-civilization ending calamity, the drive to live longer is powerful enough that we will never give up trying.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, millions of the elderly already put themselves through a lot of pain and suffering just for the chance of extending their lives for a few more months. Accepting death can be a tough ask, even if you believe in an afterlife, apparently.

The only way it happens, though, is through the continued efforts of medical researches to tackle the latest health issues that are currently killing us — i.e. today it’s cancer and dementia — in another 100 years, it will be something else, and then there will be something else after that. As long as there are new avenues to explore, and money to be made, we’re not going to give up.

So, if our technological civilization survives long enough, I’m of the opinion that long-term life-extension is inevitable–eventually. It certainly won’t happen by 2045, and almost certainly not within the next 200 years, but whether it’s 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years from now, I believe our drive to survive makes it all-but inevitable, assuming we get there before we commit global suicide, of course.

(What follows is a bit of a stream of conscious rant on all this stuff…)

It’s difficult for me *not* to fantasize about some form of life extensions, however. If only that 100 year maximum were extended to 2 or 3 hundred! Then, give me a magic button that I might decide to press in two hundred-ish years, that will (painlessly!) return me to the randomness from whence I came…

But if I have to get over the fact that I will die eventually, what’s really the difference between one hundred years and three hundred? Aren’t all transhumanists guilty of, ultimately, trying eliminate that existential, and physical, pain of dying? Which is ultimately immature: while an “ending” is something that many (but not all) people grapple with, surely the worst response is to go looking for immortality…

So a “centrist” position might be, while the goal of medicine should be to make it so that people can reasonably expect to live to their 90’s (which is already, as pointed out, really stretching society’s resources, and which requires major efforts of combating inequality, so that gains aren’t concentrated with a few Donald Trumps), any more than that should be seen as pointless, overly taxing on society, and even actively *not* sought. Despite my time lord fantasies…

One thing missing in all the techno-speculation is any consideration of whether individuals ought to live forever

This may just be me being odd, but this argument always confuses me a bit. Personally, I’d prefer for everybody to at least have the option to continue for longer than a cancer, heart failure, or accumulated age-related issues would otherwise allow (which I consider to be what contemporary medicine already does, several of my relatives would be dead “from old age” decades ago if not for cancer-treatment or other stuff). Asking whether people “ought” to live forever feels to me like it’s both a bit binary (Either life at the current length or you live forever) and like saying that people have to earn the right to future medical treatment if it’s age-related. I may be misunderstanding entirely, though. Apologies if I am.

I do agree that there is a question of who’d be given this treatment, though that seems more a societal problem than one with the concept of treatments to live longer. As I said above, I have relatives whose lives were extended decades beyond where they would have died without cancer treatment, but they got that through universal health care, not by being well-off. Going by the system here, any future medical advancements letting people live much longer would presumably fall under the same mechanisms and indeed be equally available.

I am mostly disregarding the idea that we’re anywhere near immortality, though, and considering hypothetical medical breakthroughs that means we could whack more moles and people in general live at least a bit longer and happier instead of the “we just need to solve a few issues and then we can live forever!” idea. I’d not say no to living for a few centuries more without age killing me off before I’m done, though, but that could be because transphobia from people around me are kind of making the first few decades of my life difficult to enjoy.

One thing missing in all the techno-speculation is any consideration of whether individuals ought to live forever

True, but I don’t think it matters. The drive for longer life — especially if and when it becomes a realistic dream — will be more than enough to overcome any arguments against the wisdom of it, no matter how good they are.

For better or worse, it will be yet another problem humanity will have to tackle after the cat is out of the bag.

I did say in the first sentence of my post that I was putting forward some dystopian fiction to counter the techno-utopian fiction of transhumanism proponents like Kurzweil, and noted that the two scenarios were approximately equally credible, that doesn’t mean that I think my scenario is particularly likely to actually come to pass, just not significantly less likely than all of us living in some transhumanist garden of Eden as the likes of Kurzweil and deGray suggest – something which I also find spectacularly unlikely in the time frame they are discussing.

That said, the various cultures of humanity have a longstanding tendency toward using new technologies and innovations to retrench existing societal inequality. Just look at economic trends over the last century – sure the poorest are less poor in absolute terms than they were, but the gap between rich and poor – and indeed the ultra rich and everyone else – has grown far faster. Alongside that, we have seen a significant growth in the corporatisation of even notionally democratic systems of governance all over the world, whether that takes the form of corporate citizenship as seen in the US, the insidious influence of corporate campaign funding leading to no voting options for any candidate that isn’t already bought and paid for, or cash for access scandals of the type seen in the UK. Is it any coincidence that we are now seeing the worrying rise of Donald Trump in the forthcoming US elections, a man who went from a joke candidate to a serious contender for Republican nominee almost overnight, with his only credentials for the role being that he is really obscenely wealthy?

We see everyday how the elite in our society work actively to create and maintain inequality and undue societal privilege in their favour. Many of them already see themselves as innately superior to the common run of humanity. Add into the mix a technology that could actually afford them access to a legitimate physical difference from and superiority over ‘lesser’ mortals, and it is downright naive to think that they won’t want to seize the opportunity it represents, and that they won’t seek to do what they always do – try to pull the ladder up after them to maintain their power and status in society at the expense of everyone else, probably behind a hollow fig leaf concept of some ‘trickle down’ phenomenon they know full well will never amount to anything.

Even if the specifics are nothing like the scenarios I suggest, that any transhumanism technology that may come into existence will feed into existing trends of worsening social inequality is the closest to a sure thing any of us are likely to see.

I want ubiquitous driverless cars without individual ownership – every population centre to have a fleet of ’em, like Boris bikes (only better, because no Boris involved), considered as publicly-owned infrastructure; individuals or groups can summon one using an ap – specifying number of passengers/volume of goods, destination etc. and with an algorithm capable of optimising vehicle-pooling and routes for maximum efficiency. I guess there could be a premium for urgency, and one could specify non-shared use on any given journey (ok this is my tiny slice of utopia – realistically, one is not necessarily going to be able to safely share a small confined space with strangers unless they all come with AI monitoring to prevent harassment). Kind of like a municipality-wide pool of taxis, with automatic taxi-sharing. After all, what’s the point of the technology if we don’t use it to reduce traffic and pollution?

I was just about to write something similar, but I suspect in the US at least it will happen through the private sector, but with some support from local governments, much like the way bike sharing or car sharing services have popped up. If we have truly driverless cars, individual ownership will mostly for the eccentric or the rural.

I doubt that will lead to extensive ridesharing, but I do think that a lot of smaller cars will start to pop-up (one passenger commuters, for example), and that combined with the efficiency of computer-controlled traffic will cut down drastically on congestion and consumption.

Of course, this will also drive a lot of people out of work–no more need for cabbies or uber-drivers, for example.

Four or five years ago, at a robotics conference held in the IRobot headquarters building outside Boston, I was charmed to see a bumper sticker in the parking lot proclaiming (approximately) “In case of Rapture, notify DARPA Challenge”. (I don’t know if the car belonged to a conferee or an IRobot employee.)

Ah, good ol’ techno-optimists. No problem exists that needs to be solved, except for my problem.

You can’t exactly have a political fight over the availability of non-existent medical treatments. So yeah, if these treatments become available, we can have arguments over how to ensure that everyone has access to them.

@Tacitus

So, if our technological civilization survives long enough, I’m of the opinion that long-term life-extension is inevitable–eventually.

I’m more pessimistic. Aging is a complicated thing with multiple factors, which means you’re not likely going to find any sort of “magic bullet” that eliminates or ameliorates it. Instead, you might be looking at something much more messy – a mix of treatments to slow parts of the aging process, replacement of organs, and so forth.

In the vein of ‘related sci-fi works’, I really enjoyed Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Cryoburn (part of a series, but most of them work stand-alone as well). Cryogenic tech shows up at a few earlier points in the series too, but not really at a pervasive societal level apart from this book.

I’ll have to review that series. I rather enjoyed Ian Banks works on the Culture.

That all said, I’ve been near death a number of times, have significant physiological injuries from autoimmune disease.
Not really interested in surviving my family, friends and neighbors by far.
At all.
I’m tired of burying friends. I’m utterly not interested in further exploring that trend long term.

Hordes of people yearn for the release of autonomous cars that will free them from the drudgery of driving, freeing them to drink daiquiris, read a book, or have a nap whilst they watch the omega trudge to work.

Surely Ian M Banks pointed out the problems and uncertainties of immortality in his “Culture” series. In that he had many technologies that allowed (apparently) indefinitely extended life for the consciousness but few people even attempted the feat. Those organics that did try to live forever ran into the limitations of organic brains fairly quickly and even the, (essentially unlimited) inorganic consciousnesses tended to terminate after a few of millennia.

I liked that aspect of the setting. I don’t think of immortality as “you will live forever” – it means “you will live as long as you want to live as long don’t get killed by accidents or murder”. If you decide after a couple of centuries that you’re done with it all and want to die, you can terminate yourself (or put yourself into suspended animation).

I just watched one of Michael Mosley’s programs, this one on the recent history of bacteria and viruses as pathogens, and the development of antibiotics and vaccines. He was, IMHO, overly optimistic about our ability to overcome the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He spent less than a minute toward the end of an hour-long program talking about it.

I’m skeptical of the timelines claimed for driverless cars. The technical problems seem to be a bit more than people realise. For example the current Google design requires the electronics being able to see the lines on the road. Have some snow cover the lines, or have lines that aren’t sufficiently maintained or aren’t laid down properly, and the car can’t navigate properly. And such a system will be utterly useless on a gravel road, which are still used in lots of rural areas.

Caine@62, I’ve seen “immortal” used in two slightly different ways (in fiction): As you say, (1) Cannot die, which logically then implies numerous other special properties so that you aren’t destroyed by (e.g.) “doing a Major Kong” and riding a nuclear bomb which then detonates. Perhaps (in part) because of that need for ever-more(?) implausible abilities, another definition is (2) You won’t die due to aging or similar, but you can still be killed. An “immortal” Major Kong of the 2nd type would permanently die.

52: @brett: I’m more pessimistic. Aging is a complicated thing with multiple factors, which means you’re not likely going to find any sort of “magic bullet” that eliminates or ameliorates it. Instead, you might be looking at something much more messy – a mix of treatments to slow parts of the aging process, replacement of organs, and so forth.

That was kind of what I outlined. Billions are being spent on finding cures/prevention for cancer and dementia, the two most pressing diseases affecting the elderly, and that will continue for as long as there are still avenues to explode (i.e. indefinitely). After that, it will be something else, and then something else after that — i.e. an iterative process that is really nothing to do with the quest for immortality, but simply about finding treatments for the most common causes of death. Yes, it’s likely to be messy.

I don’t believe this will be a rapid process – it will take hundreds, or quite possibly thousands of years to reach the point where average lifespans are considerably longer than 100-120 years, but as I said, for as long as we have the technological capability to do it, we’re going to keep investing billions into it, and I’m not willing to be against us succeeding eventually, some time in the distant future.

Tacitus, dementia, vascular disease and cancer are our top three killers. Limit their progress and life expectancy can easily reach 120 years, possibly 150 years.
The elephant in the room is, would anyone really want to? We’re not talking about regenerating joints, eyesight, hearing, etc. Just eliminating a few diseases that kill us.
I’m in my mid-50’s and had a nearly 28 year military career. That means, quite a few joints aren’t in very good condition, indeed, osteoarthritis has set in fairly well. With that as a basis for misery, I’d not want to extend my life greatly and continue with the arthritis worsening.
Meanwhile, let’s say that we do develop a drug, we’ll call it Whammy. Take Whammy and whammy, you will never get vascular disease, dementia or cancer, hell, throw in no diabetes as well. But, I can’t share Whammy with my family.
That’s a non-starter there. Outliving my family, especially my children and grandchildren would make me refuse it.
On another side, let’s say that the entire planet gets Whammy. Now, nobody is dying, our population increases massively, much more rapidly than now, as nobody is dying until twice their normal life expectancy. Now, we outpace our food production and starvation ends lives.

We keep asking if we can do something, shouldn’t we also be asking first, should we do that something?

I have two thoughts or questions about humans living forever.
One of the most obvious is what will happen to population growth when humans stop dieing. We are having great problems now what will have then? Zero population growth? no new people? where will that lead in a few hundred years?

The other thing in the Lord Of The Rings the Elves are functionally described to just be that immortal but could be killed. Their history up to the destruction of the ring not been fully described but has seen may wars and killing with the enemy.
The thing that stands out is the description of their sad eyes as having seen many fair things pass away. I have buried friends and relations in many species. History is mostly a list of what is dead and gone. people places and ideas

one more thought we understand that earth’s solar system is finite in space and time and will not exist in any way that will support US at some point. It also appears that the Universe may progress to a similar state. Though the time frames are immense what then for immortality.
uncle frogy

And even if you could do all the things to make our bodies live forever it’s not going to stop the other things that cause people to die. Like vehicle crashes. Or people killing other people. Or an earthquake destroying your town.

…or starving to death from lack of food, or one of the myriad problems associated with lack of clean water that will inevitably result from the already overabundant human population becoming immortal.

One of the most obvious is what will happen to population growth when humans stop dieing. We are having great problems now what will have then? Zero population growth? no new people? where will that lead in a few hundred years?

Hordes of people yearn for the release of autonomous cars that will free them from the drudgery of driving, freeing them to drink daiquiris, read a book, or have a nap whilst they watch the omega trudge to work.

I just ride the bus.

Must be nice. There’s no bus to ride where I live. I don’t drive, and could not afford to if I did, so I have to walk to get places. But the only way driverless cars would help me would be the system opposablethumbs proposed at #49, and then my social issues would prevent me from calling for a car, or sharing it, so I guess I’d still be hiking to get anywhere. My town would never do anything like that anyway, because public transportation = SOSHULISM!!11! DEVIL! and also the public can’t have nice things because poor people exist. Because reasons.

I’m interested less in the biological problems of immortality than I am the psychological effects. How much can a person actually remember? Would there be brief islands of memory in hundreds of years of blurred together fog? What would happen to your sense of self if you could only remember the last century or two in any real clarity? Would people become more depressed? Would love really endure for thousands of years? Would we have a longer view of things (be able to make bigger long-term plans) or would we live almost entirely in the moment? That’s the stuff in interested in.

Practical immortality will probably be achievable (though, I agree that I don’t know that it would be moral unless it were made available to everyone and we had the means to support a population that doesn’t die of old age or disease), eventually we will be able to engineer away the biological issues. The psychology, though, that’s something I still wonder about

@66:wzrd1. We keep asking if we can do something, shouldn’t we also be asking first, should we do that something?

Of course, but it’s not going to happen. The drive to be the first to cure [insert disease here] and reap the rewards in terms of money and fame are simply too great to be stopped. For example, if you’re the researcher responsible for developing the first vaccine against the cause of Alzheimer’s, there will a Nobel Prize with your name on it.

Remember, researchers won’t be working on the fountain of youth, they will be working on cures to cancer, vaccines against dementia, prevention of cardiovascular disease, replacement organs, stem cell therapies, etc. etc. all of which will help to extend the lives of those who would otherwise die before old age.

Perhaps one day we will have nanotechnology that can used to, say, keep arteries clear of plaque. Then maybe 50 years more research down the line, they discover how use the same technology to target and kill colon cancer cells, then breast cancer cells, then pancreatic cancer cells, and so on, over then next 100 years. Then 200 years after that, they find a way to repair damage to normal cells, or perhaps manufacture replacement cells in-situ.

The key point is that all these advances will, first and foremost, save lives. There will be no debate over their introduction. Even if there is real promise of some kind of breakthrough rejuvenation therapy, I think it’s very unlikely that it couldn’t be used to cure people of a number of devastating diseases.

I don’t diminish the problems that life-extension would bring to the world if we haven’t already stabilized our population at sustainable levels, but any serious debate over the ethics will assuredly take place after the horse has bolted.

The first million years, they were the worst. The second million, they were the worst also. The third million, I didn’t enjoy at all. After that, I went into a bit of a decline.

In a society of immortals, the women will have to quit having babies, and the men will have to quit fighting wars. This will require major cultural change. Think of every story you have seen or heard in the past year. How many of them (any of them?) did not involve mating or fighting? What will we spend out time on, and how much will we resemble humans?

“You cannot avoid comparisons to the predicted second coming of Jesus in these things, so go ahead and make it yourself.”

Imma suss that out just a little because I have a few moments.

I think that the single most common link in almost any religion, the real root, is the “get out of death” promise. Whether you’re talking about reincarnation, promises of heaven and hell, it’s even preferable to many to be sucked though your closet and floating around in the ether with Carol Anne Freeling while being held captive by the really creepy pastor Kane. Who I think is probably one of the best and creepiest bad guys in movie history. I digress. People are more comfortable with almost any other idea besides death.

The entire spiel about duality and souls stems from, though not wholly, the fear of death. Humans have always known the hard truth that when you die your body just rots, it doesn’t actually go anywhere, we can see that unquestioningly. So there has to be some other way to sell the notion that you don’t actually die when you die. The “real” you, the ghost in the machine goes on.

That being said, I think you’re right in a way, futurism is comparable to the second coming of Jesus. The idea of Jesus is merely consequential, it’s the “coming” part which is the crux of the idea. Pun intended. Where exactly is Jesus “coming” from. That has always been the promise of religion in many forms, that there really is no such thing as death. Even new age woo, though it doesn’t accept most religious authority or dogma, still keeps to the idea of an an “afterlife” because that is the real selling point. You’ve got to have something people really want.

What does it even mean “life after death”? So, you have life, then you die, then there is life again. Where exactly does that leave the idea of death. “Well you see” some will say in a brain numbing metaphor, “Death is a doorway through which you pass into another existence”. So lets get this straight, you’re alive, then there is more life. That is actually a life after life, not really life after death. That, I think, is the core concept (selling point) of most any religion. Doing away with the idea of death.

It gets better yet. Now you don’t even have to walk through that door of death to get to your new life in this new religion. Better than any fountain, elixer or soul. Just send $2 and a self addressed stamped envelope to your local transhuman society and they’ll send you the answer to immortality. People have been selling the idea that you don’t really have to die, or that immortality is just around the corner since… well, I don’t know. Probably since the first humans were able to conceptualize what death is, that’s the first moment some huckster realized they could commodify that idea.

Mrdead, speak for yourself, I’m immortal! Or was that amoral, never could keep the two straight, damned dyslexia.
Oh crap, I lost quite a few friends, both in civilian life and in the military, not a one, some seriously owing me, came back to tell me how great being dead is.
I guess, if they ain’t bragging, it’s deadly dull.
As I’m still not entirely certain, well beyond six sigma certain, I’ll stick around doing a dirt nap until proton decay of the universe.
Nah, that’d be deadly dull. I’ll let nature eat the body I no longer am using, thereby recycle many nutrients in a useful way.

Every measure of science has shown that dead is dead. Cells disassemble themselves variously, they never work again and most importantly, no mass is lost.
Remember that E=MC^2 thingie? No mass lost, no information going anywhere but in the grave or crematorium. End of story.
But, I really do like the notion of my molecules being recycled, rather than being a rotten meat soap sack in a concrete box.

@71 wzrd1
So happens I was reading about Capsula Mundi Burial Pods not long ago. If you haven’t read about that you might find it an interesting option.

I don’t really care what happens to the molecules left over in my body after death. After all, if I have replaced many of the cells in my body throughout my lifetime then there are many more cells which have already come and gone than will be left at the time of my demise. I never worried or lamented what the fate of those previous cells were. Except that the final dissolution of my cellular structure is an arbitrary end demarcation to my feeling of self continuity perhaps. So while I’m still alive and thinking about the cells that are left, I think of them as symbolizing what I once was. I suppose that’s why people like preservation. I don’t like the idea of embalming. All those nasty chemicals, seems pointless. As for taking care of whats left of me I told my family “Surprise me”.

Welp I flew way off subject there. Please forgive it’s 4am I tend to ramble.

The chilling dystopian scenario with unlimited life extension isn’t just limited to the case that only the rich could afford immortality: if immortality becomes universally distributed, only the rich (or perhaps the eugenically selected) will be permitted to have children.

Some of us still remember just ten years ago the Coming of the God Computer was 2010. Unsurprisingly, the date got quietly pushed back to 2045 that year after the surefire prediction by Great Visionary Ray that supercomputers would have as much computing power as the human brain failed to materialize.

I leave drawing comparisons to the Xtian apocalypse predictions an exercise to the reader.

As Wittgenstein noted regarding futurism, “it cannot be said what can be shown, but it can be shown what cannot be said.” But be very afraid. Right now billionaires have nothing to spend their wealth on. When immortality arrives, they will. And the inequality we have now will be a pleasant dream.